Two faced

It’s a two-way genre, radio, Janus-faced, going forwards while at the same time looking backwards, flexible enough to adapt to the internet world but also still wallowing in the wealth of its archive.

It’s a two-way genre, radio, Janus-faced, going forwards while at the same time looking backwards, flexible enough to adapt to the internet world but also still wallowing in the wealth of its archive. Just as the arrival of Radioplayer was announced in an up-to-the-minute presentation at the top of the Centrepoint building in the heart of London, of which more later, Radio 4 Extra launched its new weekday magazine, The 4 O’Clock Show, which sounds surprisingly, and endearingly, old-fashioned. It’s presented by Mel Giedroyc, whose warm, homely voice provides just the right kind of intimate authority for the hour-long afternoon show.

But it was the blend of interviews, quizzes, notes from a woodland walk in Wales in search of animal droppings, and a classic reading which took me straight back to the lost world of the 1950s and family tea while listening to Derek McCulloch and David Davis on Children’s Hour. I just hope enough young listeners find it and get hooked. It’s radio at its most versatile, veering from laugh-aloud comedy to crucial questions, and their answers, and on to brilliant sallies of the imagination, without missing a beat.

Instead of the inimitable Davis, who could pace a story better than anyone, we heard this week from the unmistakable and just as unmissable Alan Bennett as he read A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. His air of constant surprise yet down-to-earth flatness of delivery gives us Pooh as we perhaps imagined him when children but with something added. It’s as if listening now with grown-up ears we can discover an explanation for those episodes of chasing honey or getting stuck in holes not intended for persons of our more generous, less flexible proportions.